Posted by Russ Stockdale, vice president and general manager, SMB Solutions, VMware
This week in San Francisco more than 20,000 people are coming together to dive into the future of virtualization and cloud computing. And while you might think that VMworld 2012 is all about Enterprise IT… More than 30 percent of the IT pros attending VMworld work for small or midsize businesses.
So, there is no shortage of SMB buzz from the show. Here are a few of my favorite highlights so far…
SMB IT Pros – Change Agents and IT Innovators: Virtualization is now mainstream amongst SMBs, with companies increasingly focused on finding the best ways to extend the benefits of virtualization to improve IT availability and protect their businesses with enhanced backup / recovery solutions. It is great to see so many SMB IT pros here at VMworld talking about how they are gaining a competitive advantage with their virtualization deployments.
I had a chance to talk with a few of these innovators during the SMB Spotlight Session earlier today:
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MLB Network launched on January 1, 2009 in approximately 50 million homes as the largest network debut in cable history. And while MLB Network may be a global brand, it is also a classic midsize business with 450 fulltime employees, 14 IT staff and just two VMware specialists. Leveraging VMware vSphere, the MLB Network team built out a highly reliable, agile and resilient IT environment in just a matter of weeks. They started by virtualizing their business critical applications, allowing them to manage a single environment. From there the MLB Network IT team, began creating and virtualizing additional custom applications, creating a more dynamic on air-experience for viewers.
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Since 1993, Seven Corners has provided protection and professional assistance services to international travelers. With an aging infrastructure, Seven Corners took 144 servers virtual and recently deployed their own virtual private cloud in just 90 days! But they did not stop there… On the desktop side, Seven Corners virtualized using VMware View, and then deployed VMware Horizon to makes their employees’ desktop resources device-independent. It’s now easier for their employees to work anywhere. As a result of these projects, this year Seven Corners is expecting to lower IT infrastructure costs by $900,000. Pretty impressive for a company of just 180 people!
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After escaping the third-most expensive hurricane in U.S. history when Hurricane Ike hit Galveston, Texas, Myron Steves and Company realized quickly how critical implementing a disaster recovery strategy is to their business. Using VMware solutions from its desktops to its servers, Myron Steves virtualized its entire IT infrastructure – including Microsoft Exchange, SQL, SharePoint, Active Directory and the company’s VoIP system and fax software. Within 90 days the company consolidated 72 servers down to eight. As a result, they also eliminated $400,000 in annual costs for third-party disaster recovery service. (Read more about Myron Steves and Company and how they transformed their Small Business IT environment.)
Extending the Benefits of Virtualization for SMBs: In this morning’s Keynote, Steve Herrod talked a lot about the software-defined datacenter (SDDC). If you missed it, a software-defined datacenter is where all infrastructure is virtualized and delivered as a service, and the control of this datacenter is entirely automated by software.
VMware is making the software-defined datacenter a reality with the VMware vCloud Suite announced today. The vCloud Suite brings together what customers need to build, operate and manage cloud infrastructure – virtualization, software-defined datacenter services, policy-based provisioning, disaster recovery, and applications and operations management.
So, what does this mean for the more than 30 percent of the VMworld audience that work for small or midsize organizations?
Frankly, many of today’s SMBs have similar IT needs. The challenge they face is to do it all with a small team of IT pros. To help our customers meet this challenge, today we announced new VMware vSphere® 5.1 solutions to help small and midsize businesses (SMBs) simplify and protect IT with industry-leading virtualization, business continuity and automated management.
With the release of VMware vSphere 5.1, VMware will significantly extend the capabilities of VMware vSphere Essentials Plus with an update to VMware vSphere Storage Appliance, which transforms servers’ internal storage into a shared storage resource, enabling customers to use advanced VMware vSphere business continuity features such as VMware vMotion and High Availability without shared storage hardware. (Read more about what’s new for SMBs in VMware vSphere 5.1 here and VMware vSphere Storage Appliance 5.1 here.)
We also announced a new release of VMware Go™ Pro, a Cloud-based virtualization deployment and management solution hosted by VMware. VMware Go Pro makes it easier and faster to virtualize, and simpler to manage and optimize a growing infrastructure across virtual and physical machines and software. Cloud-based delivery ensures an “anytime, anywhere” IT management solution since all that a user needs is an Internet connection and a web browser to manage and monitor their entire IT infrastructure.
Topping it all off, we introduced a new VMware vSphere edition – VMware vSphere Standard with Operations Management – which combines the industry’s leading virtualization platform with the capabilities organizations need to simplify IT management and lower operational costs. VMware vCenter Operations Management Suite automates performance and capacity management to proactively ensure the performance of business critical applications. While, VMware vCenter Protect provides centralized patch management and asset inventory management to protect virtual and legacy physical systems.
Our VMware SMB solutions make enterprise-class business continuity and management more accessible to smaller IT teams and single practitioners by reducing the complexity of deploying, operating and securing these systems.
These are just a few of the amazing and inspiring moments for SMBs at VMworld thus far. We will have more news for SMBs on Day 2, as Steve Herrod and Vittorio Viarengo share some of the advancements we have been making in our end-user computing portfolio that will enable the mobile workforce. So, stay tuned for more from VMworld 2012.
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